Multi Layered Laser Cut Map of Key West

hi i'm tim belcher welcome back to the channel a couple of months ago i did a laser cut map of smith mountain lake now that project was two layers the land and the water and i spent most of that project working on the actual land image and the map details but at the end of that video i said i was going to work on creating a multi-layered map that combined both the map or the land area as well as bathymetric lines that i could get from the noaa nautical charts and this is it this is key west it's a project that combines the same work i did in the previous video with snazzy maps although in this video i don't go over much detail in that combining that with bathometric lines that i derived from noaa nautical charts now this project was pretty difficult mostly because of the research involved not necessarily the graphics work i went down a lot of rabbit holes and did a lot of research on how to find a simple method to get these bathymetric lines into this project and i think i found it so this is a multi-layered laser cut map combining map data from google maps or snazzy maps along with bathymetric lines from the noaa nautical charts this is how i made it [Music] let's quickly run through snazzy maps to grab our base map parts once in create a style i'll turn off all the map components except for the land and the water then i will adjust the colors to make the water very light and the land as close to black as possible i will then find a zoom location i'm happy with and export the full image with resolution set to three times to capture my land image i'll turn the land off and turn the roads on make some adjustments to line weights until i'm happy and without moving my zoom export my rode image i will quickly do the same for parks the airport grounds and the airport runway and those five images will combine to get me started with this project i will jump into image vectorizer to convert those jpegs into eps files and again you've seen this in more depth in the lake project video and you can also do this with free websites or free image tools like inkscape the idea is to convert these images into vector files so we can combine and manipulate them in our graphics package and i'm again using affinity designer for my own graphics work but the workflow will be similar in adobe products even coreldraw or other free options like or inkscape i've loaded these files and am now defining a new document to combine them i'll define that document as 11 by 17 to reflect the stock i'm working with which is 12 by 20 inches and because i converted them to vectors my images are no longer the same height and width as the vectors are cropped using the white space around them i'll simply stretch them and massage them into alignment manually [Music] i keep each one in its own layer and then select them all and size them for my workspace here i realize the image will work much better in landscape mode so i redefine my document to reflect that then i work with each layer making some simple color or opacity changes and i quickly have a starting point for my base map i say starting point because all in this project was a ton of work this was certainly one of the most complex designs i have made this project was probably 8 to 10 hours of work just on the graphics now a lot of that was learning if i had to do this again from scratch it would probably take me half the time and someone with a lot of experience could probably knock something similar out in just a couple of hours however this was also much of the fun with this project what do you want to put on your map how do you want it to look it's your canvas you decide how your road names look you decide how to mark your points of interest you decide how much detail you want to try to represent i'll go into more detail about what i added a little later some of the work was clean up in alignment such as taking the parks which included some of the beach areas and using the land shape to cut them to fit now let's move on to the meat of this project combining the nautical charts to get bathymetric contours and if you're like me your first stop may be a google search for nautical charts of key west and that simply doesn't work too many companies sell them the search results will be riddled with small low-res graphics for pages and pages of results let's just go to the source and that source would be noah at least for the us other countries have their own agencies but this project will be somewhat u.s based the national oceanic and atmospheric administration in the u.s is in charge of creating and maintaining nautical charts for the u.s and u.s interests i realize many may not understand what nautical charts are or how they're used i need to give some sort of primer here so you can avoid the hours of research looking for simple ways to add accurate bathymetric layers to these types of projects if you are familiar just bear with me for a minute or two first let's look at paper chart options these raster charts are likely the most common form of nautical charts you've seen through the noaa chart selector you'll notice for certain regions you have various chart options giving different chart resolutions paper or raster charts would be very difficult in my opinion to edit graphically there's just too much information densely packed onto the image so let's back up and look at the electronic or digital charts that same chart selector will allow you to find your digital chart and even download the enc or the electronic navigational chart now this data is used along with many other sources by various companies to make electronic displays for boating many of these companies like navionics shown here have web versions available i went through many of these trying to find map or display options that would simplify the image and did not find a solution with any of them i need to mention this one tangent you can download these enc files and load them into a few different gis software suites gis standing for geographic information system gis software is basically designed to allow you to show data from a variety of sources on a map gis systems are used frequently for instance for displaying data about the covet 19 spread so over the last few months we've all seen gis systems in action here's one called qgis which is free that will actually load these enc files those ent files contain depth soundings channel markers spoil areas and all that information you see when you look at a raster or a digital map they also contain vector images of contour lines and that is in the end what we want however it's pretty clear quickly that using a gis system is a bit of a science all of its own it is simply very deep and i mention them only because i believe that they may actually be the solution if you were going to make these maps for a living in fact i'm willing to bet that some of the more prolific map makers do use some type of gis software for their primary graphics works for me after spending a couple of hours in it i decided to look for an easier way and this is what i found let's go back to the noaa site and look at their enc viewer this site is backended by you may have guessed it a gis system a commercial one called arcgis the site is a bit clunky and slow but it does one important thing that the commercial sites do not do it lets you edit the layers on the chart now when we get to key west you'll notice a large portion of the chart is blank around one side of the island that's actually another chart that requires us to zoom in more to see the detail depending on your scale you may have to work around this viewing problem but it's also a common problem in other gis software packages when importing these enc files if we simply zoom in it'll provide the detail we need let's go into the layers tab and turn everything off but the depth soundings then if we go into this little gear icon or the maritime display settings under display categories turn off standard and other and now you'll see our chart looks a lot simpler and a lot cleaner lastly and here's the trick let's shade our depths under that same tab click on the depth contour it's in meters but that will work this will let us shade each of those contour layers you have just a few options here to adjust what you want to show as shallow a safety depth and a deep depth we're gonna be taking screenshots of this so you can adjust these depths how you see fit to get the depth shading you need for your project if you need a four layer map a single image will do but you can keep adjusting and taking pictures to get however many layers you need then one more final setting to make our image processing easier i'm going to go to the base map options and choose the dark gray theme that will make the majority of the land dark and then i'll simply grab a screenshot in image vectorizer i can adjust the bright the saturation and contrast to darken the layer i want and test the bitmap processing i want to combine the land and each layer into one basic black shape and then i will repeat that step with the next layer saving each off as an eps file i can then open up each relatively clean file in affinity designer i say relatively clean because we still have quite a bit of cleanup to do however i think this cleanup to a large extent would be necessary however you acquired your contour shapes from these nautical charts i've sped this clip up quite a bit but i want to leave my stumbling and learning in the video this is the actual clip of me cleaning the first layer for the first time in total this layer took me about 45 minutes to clean up i'm deleting nodes where i can and where i need to cut the vector i am drawing a white shape and combining the two shapes to create that cut and then i go back to deleting unwanted nodes there was some work on the internal shapes things like the ports that i needed to change their color to see them and then cut them out of the larger black shape and i needed to remove and straighten some of the details around channels by deleting nodes and moving others to get the shapes how i wanted once done i need to take that shape and bring it into the main document as its own layer under the land and take some time sizing and stretching it into place the land shape from google maps does line up reasonably well with these new layers so just take your time and keep an eye out for areas that need adjustment in the final product you simply want to make sure that there are no overhangs from the land to your first sub-layer you can see me flipping back and forth to the noaa charts as well as google maps to make sure i'm aligning and adjusting properly my medium depth eps file was much of the same though it was faster and a bit easier simply because the shape had less complexity i'll speed through that one and the important alignment were similar as well and suddenly i'm working with effectively a four layer map if you consider the deep or the background to be the base layer once my three layers were aligned i had to manually adjust the spoil areas that were on the nautical chart these are usually represented by large square shapes that denote areas to avoid i simply moved added or deleted nodes to get the shape i wanted and this to me was the only real quote-unquote artistic expression or guesswork that went into the layers to me the work of this is now over and it's on to the fun now we can go through and continue to add detail to our map and some of that detail can cross into those lower layers there were a couple of large piers that were not present from the google land image i can reference a satellite view and simply add those shapes in manually and join them to that land shape in areas where this will overlap the shallow and medium depth layers i would copy the shape from the land before i joined it and add a copy to the layer below i would then expand that shape slightly before adding it to that layer shape and then i would repeat below as needed then there were a lot of docks shapes that would have been too small to cut out with the land so i decided i would draw them in on the shallow layer this time i actually copied portions of the google maps satellite view to overlay as i worked and this helped quite a bit in the garrison bite area that inland marina the docks actually went into the mid-level depth now instead of having a group or layer of dock lines i had to have one for the shallow layer and one for the mid and this may seem trivial but i think the time spent working on details like this make the final product it was time to actually test this design and cut so i threw a piece of mdf onto the machine for this initial cut i just did a raster engrave using grayscale and cut the outline i was primarily testing the thickness of bridges appears the details around small cutouts and things like that the detail and scale were not bad the raster image definitely lacked enough detail with the size of the text and the font i had chosen working in grayscale for images in light burn is very tricky and really really dependent on the material overall for a first attempt it wasn't bad with that test cut in hand i could see where i needed to make some final adjustments i needed to add some bridges which just involved combining some simple shapes and i increased the width slightly on some of the existing bridge and pier areas all just to ensure that the final cutout did not have any overly weak or fragile sections i also reworked my opacity overlays of the white areas that were the background of the street names the highway numbers and the poi locations this was the first step in trying to make the text more readable my text in the test was simply not clear i think i could have left the text as part of the raster and achieved better results moving away from grayscale and selecting jarvis dither or some other algorithm but a quick check on the forum suggested that i should use a vector line and perhaps a fill and after some testing i decided vector lines and fills look the best you can see the difference here where the left is raster only the middle is line only and the right is vector fill and outline this let me get my fonts very readable at less than a five font size for this 11 by 17 canvas i decided to do one more test run on raw mdf prior to trying all the layers just to make sure that the land layer had all the detail and fixes i wanted overall it was great i made just a few minor adjustments to opacity and a couple of small fixes and then it was time to move on to the painted surfaces now some may not be a fan of my color choices and to be honest i'm not sure i am either i certainly could have moved on to birch ply and left the wood layers more natural with perhaps some transparent dyes but i had never used the laser on painted surfaces so this was as much a test or learning experience as it was trying to make a finished piece these were just some options available at my local big box store a metallic desert color and a few shades of blue i noticed that instead of smoke stains i was getting a dullness around where the raster had taken place on the painted surface i thought this may just be a residue left over from the atomized paint and in the end i think that's exactly what it was which made the cleanup super simple i moved all the pieces to the table after the cut and reassembled the puzzle the reassembly makes wiping the piece down with some isopropyl alcohol very easy as the paper towel doesn't catch on any of the sharp edges and after just a minute or two the piece looked great now let's talk quickly about the sub layers i was definitely going to paint them and the entire time i was working on this project i was worried about the glue up i know you're not supposed to glue painted surfaces together it would certainly adhere to the unpainted undersides but i was worried about the painted top sides i also didn't know how i would align each layer perfectly especially around those islands and reef areas i decided to copy each main layer shape onto the layer below as a reference guide i would take all the layer shape information from layer 3 for instance and flatten it into one shape and etch that outline into the layer below i'd expand the stroke of that shape inward slightly so that when i placed the shape above i wouldn't see the etch line below it and that took care of the alignment problem but not the glue i was considering all sorts of ways to mask that area or how to sand back the paint or how to somehow mar that surface so the glue would hold when i realized i had a laser then it just clicked i would take the outline i was making for alignment and just laser in a grid of lines to cut through the paint and that would give the glue enough to set and hold and in light burn that was actually pretty simple on that shape simply do a line and fill and on the fill set the dpi so that you only get about 12 or so lines per inch now i have my alignment marks and a good surface for that glue to bond and that is the digital side of this project complete on the lowest or the darkest layer i centered the shape for engraving on a rectangle that was 17 and a half by 11 and a half and i'll use that extra quarter of an inch to mount this in a frame at another time it may be hard to see some of those engraved lines on the film even in the light of the shop i needed to use a flashlight to make sure my placement was on point [Music] and i certainly should have had some tweezers handy for the small parts but honestly i was excited to see what it looked like finished i simply used thick ca without activator to give me a little more time to make sure things were aligned and i just sort of gotten a zone and had fun with the assembly for the first time i'm actually making my design files available for download on etsy for what i think is a fairly nominal price i think i covered my process here fairly well hopefully enough that you don't need my files but if for some reason you do or maybe just want the files to work with on your own the link is in the description down below [Music] i gave it a quick matte clear coat and could call this one done i had a ton of fun designing and making my first multi-layered laser map and i hope you enjoyed my process for making it if you liked it or found it useful please hit that subscribe button give the video a like and ask me anything in the comments [Music] and as always thanks for watching you

Channel: This Is How I Made It

Views: 5,235

Rating: 4.9344263 out of 5

Keywords: laser, laser map, laser cut, 3d map, layered map, map art, laser art, laser map art, affinity designer, glow forge, glowforge, laser projects, snazzy maps, snazzymaps, NOAA, NOAA nautical, nautical map art, nautical maps, nautical charts, bathymetric, bathymetric lines, bathymetric maps, thisishowimadeit, maker, makersgonnamake, wood map art, wood maps, wood laser map

Id: xCohuksbsn8

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020